This is the first beta release of the OctaneRender™ 2018.1 for LightWave™ plugin version 2018.1.0.0, available for LightWave 11.6, 2015.3 and 2018.0 Windows x64 and OSX. This build has been compiled using the Octane 2018.1 XB2 core.

As with all experimental releases, please do not use this for production purposes.2018.1 XB2 will expire in 60 days

New featuresTo learn more about the new features and improvements of OctaneRender 2018.1, please check out the 2018.1 release post, but this a quick list of the main new features that have been added:

NV Link support on RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti

Cryptomatte. Currently, in the LightWave plugin, the Instance ID is used also as Object ID due to its internal scene graph architecture.

Vertex Attributes in the mesh objects. New options in the Octane object properties custom object plugin to configure the attributes to be extracted.

New "Color Vertex Attribute" and "Float Vertex Attribute" nodes to retrieve the vertex attributes in the shaders.

Deep render passes.

Way less Volume Render Noise. New option in the kernels to disable this feature if the matching of the Octane v4 volumes is needed.

Direct Levelset surface rendering. New option in the Octane volumetrics custom object plugin to configure the OpenVDB rendering to work with SDFs and assign their Octane material nodes.

Edit: Okay, first of all this kicks ass being able to use colors and weights to blend etc (I freakin' love it!).. but this is a little cumbersome J... Having to enable Attributes in Object Properties first, and then needing to type in the color or weight name (either need to remember or retrieve name) is kinda strange... Is there nothing in the LWSDK to allow you to have an input in the Octane Vertex Attribute node that could have a LW Weight Map or Vertex Color node be plugged into it, which allows us to choose our map from a pulldown?....

Edit Part Deux: But regardless J, this is truly wonderful! I've been wanting this since v2, and it is finally here! Yippee! Thank you so much bro for continuing to do what you do! Yoo da man!

The weight map "Weight" and the color map "Vertex Color" are extracted automatically, you don't need to add the object properties plugin to extract them.

Unfortunately all the vertex maps in the LightWave have the same limitation that we can see in the UV maps: they are defined at the scene level, and the only what to know what maps are used for each vertex in each object is to iterate all the maps available in the scene for each vertex to know if the vertex has them or not, something that is really slow, so if you want to work with complex scenes with a lot of maps, declaring the maps used by each object is the only way to don't destroy the scene extraction performance.

Hi all, HNY to all of you.I have bought a render slave licence yesterday (and another GC, an RTX 2080 TI one in addition to my two 1080 TI) and I have just tried network rendering. It is trully efficient O_o